Oh, the horror of recommending a public forum. (/s, of course.)
A fair number of questions aren't unique - product questions, how to use an API, etc. Someone may have asked a similar question, in which case you'll find an answer, find it faster than it'll take to hear back from the support team, and it deflects an unnecessary (already answered) ticket. That should be a win all around.
Now if you do have a novel question or something account-specific, by all means, open a ticket. There you'll get replies from people who can look up your account and give you specific answers.
The ombudsman tip in this post doesn't make a whole lot of sense when the normal support process wasn't really given a chance before making the blog post.